For Plant Food + Wine's Miami outpost, architect Rene Gonzalez says he focused on “a seamless interface between indoor and outdoor.” Here’s how he made the connection. Figuratively, it comes courtesy of the ambiguity created by the gardens’ reflections in the bronzed mirror strips on the accordion-pleated sidewalls. On a more literal level, the front wall disappears entirely when its glass panels fold away.

The Azores are unlikely enough as geological formations go, with nine islands sprinkled in the Atlantic Ocean off the Iberian peninsula. Christopher Columbus sailed there on his way back from the New World to Spain, and the archipelago is now about a two-hour flight from Lisbon. So a long-abandoned storehouse for wine on the coast of Pico Island is a truly unlikely hot spot for cosmopolitan travelers. But that’s precisely the scenario of Cella Bar, one of several collaborations between FCC Architecture and Paulo Lobo Interior Design.

As longtime bartenders at a Berlin institution, the Green Door, Torsten Bender and Sebastian Mathow knew that several of its hippest competitors had been designed by the same small firm, Hidden Fortress. So when Bender and Mathow decided to open their own place, they immediately asked the firm’s three partners, Jan Maley, Björn Meier, and Ingo Strobel, to help. The partners, in turn, enlisted frequent collaborator CollignonArchitektur. “We requested a bar without an obvious concept,” Bender says. “People should come in, order a drink, and only then start noticing unusual details.” And there are plenty at Bar Zentral, especially considering that it consists of just 390 square feet tucked under a brick arch of the S-Bahn rail viaduct.